Trigger warning. I let my dark sense of humour write this one.
It is about marketing and my inevitable, erotic, gravy-induced death.
Sometimes I feel like the only author whose chest physically hurts when I think about putting links at the back of books in the hopes someone gives me even more money for more stories. I know I’m not the only author who feels this way, but in the moment you become very isolated. You are sitting there, having (hopefully) written something meaningful. It is the end of the book, the end of a universe, when the reader is at their most affected. They are floating alone in the cosmos above your story, thinking over everything that has clicked together. It is a beautiful moment.
and the moment is cheapened. Or is it? The reader is happy with their new purchase, is about to write a glowing review, and is presented with a prompt to sign up to your mailing list or Patreon or Onlyfans or to simply post nice, shiny Aztec gold to your house directly through your bathroom window. This seems like a good thing surely? If they loved your story, they will probably want to read more. You are giving them more of the thing they like, right?
Sort of.
Ads at the back of books are euphemistically called a ‘Call To Action’ and the action is typically ‘get someone to spend more money’ or ‘get someone to join your mailing list so at some point in the future they might spend more money’. This is all upselling, and it is upselling that keeps some of my friends alive.
So I understand the need for it. Not too long ago, I had to go into my overdraft to get a train to a radio interview, and I didn't make enough sales back to cover the ticket. On my way home, I had a fleeting realisation that I am draining more resources from my family than I am providing, and that they would be financially better off if one of the many speeding taxis in Manchester stopped merely flirting with death and finally veered onto the pavement, killing me.
It gets darker now. You can turn back if you like, or read a free story instead.
And there comes the chest pains. The concept of pushing other human beings to buy more art I’ve made whilst they are still enjoying the art they have just bought fills me with dread. It is analogous to a waiter forcing more chips into your mouth as you are still eating the ones he brought to the table two minutes ago. He asks “Are you enjoying ze chips?” and you nod shyly. He then wrenches your head back and forces one of those science class funnels into your mouth. In go more chips.
“Would you like ze gravy?” he asks. You are both crying. For some reason you have an erection, which you will try not to bring up in therapy next week. Because it is trapped within your trousers, your erection becomes crooked and deformed, like one of those Japanese watermelons they grow in boxes.
^ Think about that for an uncomfortable amount of time, please.
I am no salesperson. I'm an artist.
Despite what the email gurus tell you in their increasingly hard-to-find newsletters buried under subscribe buttons and stories about their nephew’s fitness syrup startup, an Artist and a Salesman are not one and the same. It's a compromise between two different modes of thinking that you have to balance in your brain. It is a self-imposed identity crisis. It is an existential nightmare. Who am I?
What is a Phillip? How might I obtain one? Is there an ideal level of Phillipness?
Because I could be writing a story today. But I am not. I am instead tweaking that little graph on Amazon that tells me if I can afford to go out and perform on stage next week. Spoiler alert: I’m going out regardless.
I would rather be writing a story.
So why does marketing affect me so much?
I have a soul, allegedly. I also want to provide for my family. And, because I’m not the type to use sob stories for sales, I am having a difficult time doing it. Maybe that in itself is a sob story. I could tell the X Factor I was sadly born without a sob story.
Every time I make an advert, or add 'backmatter' or 'calls to action' or any other salesy thing, I get this feeling in my chest that my life is not just meaningless, but that on some level it is not worth living. It is not that I want to die, but that I want to be lost somewhere, dug up in a million years, and allowed to explore the galaxy. But then it isn't that either. It is that I want to provide for my family.
I can make them laugh easily, and I’m good when things get stressful (not much bothers me beside the existential dread outlined above), but I would quite like to be able to buy a car and drive my sister around when she wants to go to the big Tesco at 3am. At present I can’t do that, and I wish I could. She’s not had a life as easy as mine. I’m no therapist, but I think a few early morning food shops should rectify twenty years of bullshit.
So, much like the characters (and indeed the reader, as the darker stories are interactive) in Who Built The Humans? I am faced with a darkly comedic choice.
1) Walk into a forest and die
2) Walk into a forest and get abducted by aliens
3) Walk into a forest and then walk home to discover I sold some books
4) Walk into a forest and eat a mushroom I find, thus hallucinating scenario 3
Walking into a forest to die is something that is strangely appealing at this early stage in my career. I can easily get on stage and make a room full of people laugh, but I am still very much alone in the early hours when I get most of the writing done. I like writing the serious stuff alone, but the comedy is often improvised in the minutes before I read it, which has its own setbacks I’ll explore in another episode.
I am alone in the day time too. If you are even moderately successful at social media marketing, you likely spend a lot of your time talking to people who pretend to care about things. These people usually have more followers than you, because virtue signalling sells almost as well as a sob story (and I have plenty of those, but don’t worry, I also have a stubborn refusal to use the things).
I’ve known enough “allies” that secretly did not care one bit about an issue, but who sold books on the back of lackluster “representation”. I don’t do that. I simply try to write entertaining Science Fiction, Comedy, and Poetry. There are characters of all sorts in my stories, but I’m not the kind of person to brag about having one lesbian in a story just so I can throw paperbacks at lesbians during Pride festival. Thinking about it, that’s probably a hate crime anyway. If it isn’t it should be.
Characters come first, identities come later, and identities should never be used as the sole way to market something. So I am un-woke, to use new terminology.
Because adverts that pander to identities are dehumanizing.
To me, they read like this:
Do you like being gay?
Do you like reading gay things?
If so, you will love my new book
THE GAYLIENS
If you don’t buy it you hate gay people.
That is barely even satire. I had an argument with someone on instagram once, who told me that my disinterest in a book was motivated by the author’s race, not because the book was a memoir and I have no interest in reading memoirs. (Also, I have not checked if Gayliens is a real book. I jokingly invented the title in 2015 and never wrote the book. Maybe one of my clones did)
So to conclude.
I hate marketing. This is probably the utter highlight of any marketing I will ever do. It is all I can afford right now, and if I don’t sell Sci-Fi books or a poetry book or that other poetry book off the back of this newsletter, I am fucked. That’s another marketing term. ‘Fucked’ means you aren’t making any money.
Marketing is soul-destroying. The thought of trying to sell people things at the end of the things they have just bought is nightmarish. It feels like a constant cycle of pressure applied to readers who I would much rather thank by throwing free stories at them. But I need to eat, I guess. And they have money, and I’m making a product. So I guess it makes sense.
I still hate it though. It makes me uneasy, like knowing there is a spider behind the toilet but you are only half way through a difficult poo. And the spider has a knife.
I feel the same way whenever a door to door salesman comes to my house, but I make sure to have a laugh with them in the vain hopes that I have postponed their suicide by five more minutes1. I know what that life is like. I split my foot open walking up and down streets when I was 17, trying to sell scam phone contracts to people who didn’t deserve to be bothered by door to door people. I had a lovely little mental breakdown, astral projected, and made friends with a fellow Doctor Who fan in hospital. My mum rescued me at 5am and got me a McDonalds. I have yet to pay her back.
I only took that job to spend more time away from my dad.
THERE IT IS. THE SOB STORY.
Will Simon Cowell help me sell books now?
I ALSO HAVE AN ITCHY LEG. PLEASE HELP ME.
Thank you for reading this whole thing. Here is the back matter call to action sales funnel spending tube flange cannon B2B automatic email clicker banger bouncer spring subscription enforcement box. Please give it things.
And if you liked the mean-spirited comedic tone of this, you will be pleased to know that my debut sci-fi comedy collection Who Built The Humans? is much better, packed with 47 short stories, and made one reader piss himself (I am not joking).
It is £9.99 until the end of July, to celebrate my first convention as an author.
I will be selling books at Manchester ComicCon!!!
Though, if the joke is particularly awful, I may cause it.